Is Your Child Ignoring You?

You come home from a long day of work, you sit home and all you wanted to do is nothing. Just wanna watch tv, flip the channels, watch news, watch the dow jones industrial average. You wanna check what's going on in the world, even though you won't remember any of it nor do you care, but this is your form of entertainment...and your kid comes over, your five year old comes over, 'Dad.. look what I made, look what I did, Dad...play with me, Come on. Let's do something, let's play tag.' And they are talking to you, talking to you, talking to you and what are you doing? 'Could you leave me alone? I am trying to watch the news' and you call someone, 'Can you? Eh Fathima! Can you get rid of him please, I just came home from work, I need some peace. I don't need to hear this. Don't you have toys I bought you? Go play with those!'

Same child, ten years later, he is 15 years old and you are picking him up from school and you say, 'So son, how was your day?' 'I dunno!' 'What you do?' 'I dunno!' 'Did you talk to any friends?' 'May be...' 'Where are you gonna go later?' 'Somewhere...' 'What you gonna do?' 'I dunno' They won't talk to you. And then you come tell the imam, 'You know...my kid doesn't talk to me.'

Ya...you didn't talk to him! You didn't talk to him all this time, you didn't have time, you didn't create your relationship first, how is it just gonna come out of nowhere? It doesn't. And those are the ages, by the way, 10,11,12,13 those are the critical ages. At those ages, you know before then, children are most obsessed with making their parents proud, doesn't even matter what religion you are from, this is just pure child psychology. Young children just wanna make their parents proud. They wanna show their parents what they've done. The biggest source of influence to them is their parents. They wanna do everything their parents do. If I am sitting there, typing on a laptop, even my 2 year old, I give him a toy and leave that alone, he wants to type that on the laptop. Why? Because Abba (daddy) is doing it. They wanna be like you. But that changes, as they get to a certain age. Now they wanna be like their other friends. And more importantly, they wanna be nothing like you. They want to be the exact opposite of everything you are. They go through that phase. They are getting into a dangerous age. And that critical age, if you didn't already have a very open, friendly, clear, transparent, loving relationship, if that wasn't already there, you are in for some serious trouble, there are some serious trouble headed your way...

by - Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan